Welcome to the garden centre

This morning, apart from putting on a load of washing, there was nothing pressing for us to do.  We are having difficulty relaxing into this hiatus between one house and the next - I, in particular, am all the time "wanting to do something", and struggle to regard this as a holiday.  But we're in a part of the country I'm not really familiar with, and there are lots of places to explore, though we're quite keen to avoid the roads over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Mundane stuff done, we decided to walk down to a local garden centre this morning.  We couldn't find a footpath, had to walk down the road.  Quite a busy road, thank goodness there was a pavement, though it was a bit narrow in places.  Lots of blackberries.

Quite a large garden centre.  We were unimpressed by the approach, with multiple split bags of compost and hard-core.  Clearly this bag had been sitting there split open for some weeks/months.  

Inside, we were careful not to be tempted to buy anything - not really difficult.  But they had some comfortable and functional garden furniture - no temptation to buy as it is clearly impractical to consider transporting to Ireland, but it did make us think about our plans for the outdoor space at our potential new home.

We had a reasonably pleasant cup of tea and a piece of lemon meringue pie.  But we won't bother to return - we'll keep exploring for new places.

After lunch we walked in to Stoney Stanton, investigated a small local store and decided it really didnt have what we needed, so picked up our few essentials from the local Co-op.  

This evening we've unsuccessfully tried to make the TV work - apparently there's no signal for Freeview, but supposedly we can get BBC iPlayer - but we couldn't make it work.  Our hosts are away for the weekend - when they get back we'll ask them to bring some tech-savvy to the situation.  Meanwhile, we have tablets, phones, and books.